Why IT Spending Is All About the Business

Why IT Spending Is All About the Business

IT’s primary objective, as always, is to support the business, but how IT spends its resources is now tightly linked to key business outcomes.

Crucial Link

70% of survey respondents say it is either "very important" or "critical" to link IT investments to key business outcomes.

Communications Gap

Just 47% say their organization is doing a "very good" or "excellent" job of communicating/demonstrating the impact of IT investments upon key business outcomes.

Lean Machine

56% say they're considering the streamlining of their operational processes to more effectively drive business outcomes through IT investments, and 38% want to increase standardization to do this.

Priority Shifts: Protective Stance

In making tech investment decisions, 75% of survey respondents say their organization is more focused on the improvement of IT security than it was two years ago.

Priority Shifts: Budget-Minded

51% say their company is more focused on managing costs through IT investments than it was two years ago.

Priority Shifts: Safety Strategy

49% say they're more focused on mitigating risk through IT investments than it was two years ago.

Dominating Agenda

68% say that key business outcomes/goals take a higher priority when making IT investment decisions, compared to just 32% who say tech operational outcomes take a higher priority in making these decisions.

Wheels in Motion, Part I

80% are either currently running, building or planning a cloud/virtualization management initiative, and 75% are doing the same for application performance management.

Wheels in Motion, Part II

78% are either currently running, building or planning a process automation initiative, and 71% are doing the same with efforts to converge data center infrastructure.

Most Challenging Tech Initiatives to Deploy

While most CIOs, IT execs and senior managers agree that it's important to link tech investments to key business outcomes, relatively few feel their organization does a very good job of doing so, according to a recent survey from Datalink. The report, titled "The Importance of Linking Business Outcomes to IT Investment Strategy," indicates that these leaders clearly believe that tech spending is all about supporting the business these days—as opposed to merely benefiting IT operations. To get more out of their buck here, companies are looking to streamline operational processes and launch standardization initiatives. With this, they expect to reap the ROI-generating rewards of enhanced IT security and operational efficiency, lowered overall costs, improved customer/client experiences and decreased risk. Other projects considered of high value include cloud/virtualization deployment, application performance management, process automation and data center infrastructure convergence. More than 100 CIOs, IT execs and senior-level managers took part in the research, which was conducted by IDG Research Services.

Dennis McCafferty is a freelance writer for Baseline Magazine.

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